Question:

I'm running into a formatting issue using variables in the summary report and I can't figure it out why the last line in the last column doesn't align with the rest of the column.




Answer:

Since "limtype%1" grows one character longer when %1 advances from 9 to 10, the final Margin field gets pushed right out of alignment.

macro summary
variable d={dev%1}, t={T%1}, lm={lastmarg%1}
\ { d} { t:2} {limtype%1 } { lm:1}
/

The solution is to first copy limtype%1 value to a fixed size variable (say, lt={limtype%1}). That was already done for lm={lastmarg%1} above, but the motive was probably to create smaller lm that fits inside { lm:1}, not realizing this was solving the secondary problem of changing field length as %1 changes size.

The basic rule is that we always want fixed length fields when running through multiple aligned rows

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